A NATION CHALLENGED: REPORTER'S DIARY; Two Worlds Paired by War: Life or Death, as Luck Will Have It

The sniper sat behind sandbags on the roof of the American Embassy as the sun dropped behind the Paghman Mountains and the sky began to fade. A camp stove at his knee exhaled the stink of diesel and a steady hiss.

His name was Sgt. Shane B. Schmidt. He was a marine. This was his bunker. To his left was a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight. To his right were five candy canes hanging on a cord. Sergeant Schmidt had been vacationing in Wisconsin when the hijacked jetliners knocked the World Trade Center down. Watching it happen live on television, he said, ''was like being a boxer who couldn't hit back.''

Now the capital of Afghanistan was spread out before him, freed of the Taliban and as quiet as midnight in Central Park. He was momentarily content. ''The coalition forces?'' he said. ''Let's just say they've done a pretty good job of clearing out the rats.''

It was among the last in a series of memories that will endure for life. The sky darkened. The stars came out. It was Christmas Eve and peaceful enough to nap. The trip hadn't started out like this.

On the first night, three and a half months earlier and 7,000 miles away, Police Officer Eric Josey wandered the wreckage near Liberty and West Streets, a broad-shouldered silhouette illuminated by fire. The space where the towers had been was a mountain of burning rubble and a column of black sky.

Officer Josey was dazed. His face was plastered with ash and sweat. He paced, sat, got up to pace again. Three members of his emergency services truck were lost somewhere in the pile. Around him were shattered fire engines. Their lights still flashed and radios called out but most of their crews were dead. A cop nearby, in stained civilian clothes, spoke his missing brother's name. Officer Josey looked away.

''We've been in there all day and we can't get to anybody,'' he said, steam rising from his neck and back. ''Everybody's gone.''

New York and Afghanistan, paired worlds of rubble, work and grief. To travel from one to the other -- 12 days at ground zero; three months in Central Asia and Afghanistan -- was to wander a succession of stages populated by distinct and overburdened tribes.

From afar, the escalating events, filtered through radio, television and newspapers, achieved a sort of context, with analysis and interpretation from many points of view. Up close, context usually fell away. The devastation in New York and Afghanistan, and the war that joined them, became a blur of people and impressions. No single scene can capture it, at least not according to the notebooks, or the memories tumbling out.

New York. A tremendous platinum-and-gold flash where the jet disappeared into the tower, and then the explosion's roar and screams from a crowd breaking into a run. Mothers on a stairwell in the smoky Trinity Church day care center, cradling children and getting ready to step outside, unaware that the remaining tower was about to go. An old woman in a wheelchair being pushed down Greenwich Street, visible one moment and lost the next as another stampede began and the second wave of stinging dust swooshed through. A fire chief limping as he escorted out the bagged remains of one of his battalion's dead. A National Guard captain walking by flashlight through the lightless World Trade Center basement, his beam briefly illuminating the face of the Bugs Bunny doll at the ruined Warner Brothers store.

A word on an iron worker's helmet. ''War.''

Afghanistan. A teenager tossing a grenade into a brown river -- ga-loomph, a geyser of spray -- and then wading in to look for stunned fish. A haze of dust at sunset as the Northern Alliance infantry moved from Bangi to Khanabad, the restless soldiers hoping to claim the city in time to break the Ramadan fast. Two Taliban soldiers on their backs in the Kunduz bazaar, the dime-sized bullet holes in their foreheads showing the manner of execution hours before. A 10-year-old boy whose home was destroyed by American bombs describing pain in two limbs he no longer had. An alliance general, handsome enough for the cover of a fashion magazine, flossing his teeth after dinner, admitting he was confused.

''All of my life, a fight,'' said the general, Atiqullah Baryalai, his brown eyes fixed on nothing, his right forearm traced with scars. ''Now we have to govern. To do this we must think very hard.''

Sometimes the notes and memories contained a distillation of a theme. Some matched the sound bites on the shortwave radio when the shortwave radio worked. Some were separated by minutes; others by a week. They tell of fear, fatigue, pain, fury, courage, carnage, betrayal, sorrow, hunger, despair, disease, bewilderment, loneliness and regret. They tell of boredom, of wondering what would happen next.

They tell of joy. A few days before Afghanistan's new government was sworn in, a line of Afghan porters, crossing the Salang Pass high in the Hindu Kush, trekked through rock and snow as an American warplane passed overhead. They were poor men with filthy clothes and hacking winter coughs. The Taliban had been defeated. They were about to get their nation back.

The plane dropped pods of glowing flares, four at a time for miles, leaving a descending trail of smoke and light in a bowl of mountain air.

''It's like when the Russians left,'' one porter said, his breath full at 11,000 feet. ''It means victory! Victory!''

Maybe he was right.

Unless you asked the sniper (''It's not over,'' Sergeant Schmidt said. ''Wherever there is terrorism, that's where we want to go.'') Unless you asked the cop. (Officer Josey's unit had given its blue shoulder patches to the military to glue to aircraft bombs. He said, ''They've got a lot more bombs to drop.'')

They were dual worlds, Manhattan and Afghanistan, full of contrasts and common themes. They doled out two lessons, over and again: that your truth depends upon your tribe, and the power of luck is almost absolute.

What happened? Depends upon who was asked, and there were more tribes with a stake in what was going on than could quickly be counted: politicians, cops, Pashtuns, refugees, clerics and Green Berets; firefighters, Uzbeks, widows, orphans, amputees and marines. Each one had a different version, even when talking about the same thing.

A Taliban soldier in a hospital bed lifted a sheet to show where two bullets had passed through his groin. He said he had been ordered to drop his weapon by an alliance soldier, and when he did the soldier shot him there. It was just another interview, until the pro-alliance translator realized it was being written down.

''This man is lying,'' he said. ''Do not listen to him. All of his words are lies.''

The Talib pleaded for antibiotics and pain killers. The translator walked away.

Every tribe had its talkers, from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to a one-legged Tajik car thief. Some were crazy. Others lied. Many were honest and got it right. There were few rules for dealing with each. But a former British infantryman, who knew the country and gamely shared his hidden Scotch, had one: whenever an Afghan soldier gives you a number, he said, always take away one of the zeros.

Many times it just about worked: an alliance commander said he had 100 men, but only 11 could be found. Sometimes it was not enough: tips about a Taliban massacre near Kunduz -- ''200 people slaughtered, maybe more,'' the Afghan soldiers said -- led to a search that turned up one shepherd who knew of six dead.

Or maybe we missed things. Given the lack of sleep and language barriers, it was just as likely the case. We got lost almost every day. We were always headed somewhere else.

The different interpretations went on and on. Some revealed only ignorance, as when the mayor's administration said ground zero needed no more volunteers, and the volunteers around the rubble desperately needed help. Others revealed the distance between cultures locked in war.

The construction worker arrived at West Street, maybe on Day 4, wearing canvas overalls and a sweatshirt with a collar tight on his muscular neck. He had the personality of a boss. He organized a crew of sweepers and for 12 hours worked them harder than anyone else in sight. His name was Anthony. He wanted every Muslim in America to be put in camps.

''Look at what they did here, man,'' he said, sitting to eat with firefighters in the broken glass and trash. ''This was our neighborhood.''

Places changed, perspectives changed, there was always another take.

Six weeks later, a Muslim woman sat primly on a bench in the Ferghana Valley, Uzbekistan, where in 70 years of occupation the Russians had gotten things just about perfectly wrong. Communists had tried banning Islam while ruining the economy and denying citizens civil rights. The repression spawned basmachis, Islamic guerrillas and some of the precursors to the mujahedeen.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

After Uzbekistan became independent in 1991, President Islam Karimov attacked faith with fresh zeal. He locked up men for praying in public or circulating religious books. In the woman's city of Namangan, more than 1,000 men who tried to rebuild a mosque had been sent to jail. In the past week two had come home dead.

Here, Anthony seemed to have his way: Muslims were in camps. What came of it? As Mr. Karimov pressed harder, children begged in alleys and the resistance grew anew.

Some men fought in the Ferghana, others slipped into Afghanistan, where veteran guerrillas trained them and Al Qaeda gave them guns. They started out as fighters against oppression. They ended up bunking with angry men from across the Muslim world -- Pakistanis, Chechens, Tajiks, Arabs, a Westerner or two -- foot soldiers in the global jihad.

The woman's husband had been found working at the mosque and was imprisoned after a secret trial. She had no heat, meat or plumbing, and was too poor to send her children to school. She said she had no sympathy for the terrorists but understood what drew men to the fight.

It had a familiar ring. ''We are educated, and we know that America made a revolution to get its freedom,'' she said. ''When you had this revolution, were your conditions as bad as ours?''

It was almost always someone else's fault, no matter where you went.

Six weeks later still, at a Kunduz high school the Taliban had commandeered, former Taliban soldiers were still around. They had changed their hats from Taliban black turbans to the alliance's tan pakool, and a dozen turncoats followed two visitors down the hall. A sign over one door said: ''Arabs.'' Over another: ''Do not enter without permission.'' A third: ''Uzbeks.''

This was a barracks for foreign members of the Taliban. It spoke of bravado turned to despair.

Perhaps once these jihad warriors were fearsome, but in the end they were too scared to go outside. In the final days of the bombardment, before switching sides or surrendering, they used their quarters as a toilet and ate the pigeons that flew in through the open roof. They left behind land mines and cocky graffiti: ''The rising of Osama bin Laden'' or ''Our way is the jihad.'' They gave up Kunduz with hardly a fight.

Even their former comrades spoke of them with contempt. ''The foreign Taliban were bad people,'' said one of the turncoats, Jawid Gaurd, 15 and peach-fuzzed, with an AK-47 on his back.

His father, Abdullah Gaurd, had been an Afghan Taliban commander, and the next day the father waited at the top of a staircase in his home while his bodyguards escorted visitors in. He spoke convincingly, touching points in the new party line -- about peace, rights and democracy; about Afghanistan's allies in the West.

Only once did he slip, when recounting how many people he had killed. He was somewhere in the hundreds when he caught himself and stopped. ''But never any civilians,'' he said, pointing his finger for emphasis. ''Never. Not even one. You can ask all of the people in our city. They will tell you: Abdullah Gaurd is a great friend to Afghanistan's people.''

Out in the city, people scowled when they heard his name.

Out in the countryside, signs of the dead were all around. In places the roads were lined with fresh graves with white and green flags, the mark of martyrs, snapping in the wind. In others, with the rusted hulks of Soviet tanks or bomb craters ringed with sparkling bits of glass.

Here and there the bombs had missed, and the Afghans were digging through their homes for civilian dead. It was just like the police and firefighters downtown, except they had no welders, cranes or budget for it, and no one handing out Gatorade and turkey rollups or cheering when they broke for sleep.

There were places where the bombs did not explode, and they sat in families' yards. Muhammad Baz waved from his door in Charykari and the crowd walked right into his living room and saw the huge bomb's protruding fin. It happened kind of fast. When a visitor stepped backward, Mr. Baz scoffed and flicked his wrist.

''Puh!'' he said. ''Your country put it here, and you are afraid.''

There were children all around him, staring and shaking their heads. The interview continued down the street.

People have been conditioned, through lore and life alike, to expect certain qualities as arbiters of survival. Judgment, physical fitness, alertness, a knack with equipment -- all are supposed to ensure that a person in a bad spot has a chance of getting out.

In countless cases in New York and Afghanistan, they mattered not a bit. Chance was the ultimate arbiter, and good luck and bad were best expressed by the locations of one's feet when the planes came in, when the buildings came down or when bombs landed on a house.

One man's feet were at Liberty and Church on Sept. 11. He lived. Another's were in an office on the 65th floor of the second tower. He didn't. What determined who was where? Nothing much. It was impossible to choose to be in the good spot or the bad one, because when people made their decisions they had no idea of how serious the outcome would be a few minutes later, just as when an Afghan family took shelter in an airstrike it could not know that of all the bombs that would land in their neighborhood, the one that would crash through their ceiling would not explode.

Bad judgment or sloth could get someone killed, but good judgment and fitness wouldn't necessarily keep them alive. It was luck, and there were moments when it seemed the most powerful force in the world, stronger than the jihad soldiers' certitude in the will of God, stronger than America's bombs.

Then there were exceptions.

A lean alliance commander, Rhamazhoni, stood near a bomb crater on the highway the morning after Khanabad fell. A dozen of his men had been killed in rice fields roughly two weeks before, and now that the front lines had shifted he had come to give them proper graves. The first victim, Rahim Ullah, was carried to the shoulder of the road. Someone put a blanket over his mud-caked face. He had been a big man. It took six soldiers to carry his remains.

Mr. Rhamazhoni said he died like this: the men had been stranded after the Taliban ambushed their vehicles and they scurried into the fields. They fought until they were short of ammunition and then they tried to run. Some were injured and couldn't keep up, and were executed as the pursuing Taliban ran them down.

One man escaped, the other did not, and the reason was so basic it might have come from a schoolyard game of tag. ''I was faster than him,'' Rhamazhoni said.

These were the constants: Just when you thought you had figured something out, you were proved wrong. You always risked missing the most important moments, because you were looking for something else.

The snow crunched beneath the hikers' feet. It was during a rest break in the Hindu Kush, and the porters crowded in to ask where the two foreigners were from. ''London? Germany? America?'' one said.

We were trying to keep the group moving so we could make it to Kabul.

''New York,'' I answered, in a hurry, starting to walk away.

He stopped me by my elbow, making sure his eyes had mine. When he spoke again it was in the slow diction of a man on an excursion into an unfamiliar language, but who wanted to be heard. He nodded, deep enough to be a bow, before raising both hands to eye level and letting them flutter to his waist.

The meaning was obvious, even high in mountains in a distant corner of the earth. Towers falling down.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on December 31, 2001, on Page B00001 of the National edition with the headline: A NATION CHALLENGED: REPORTER'S DIARY; Two Worlds Paired by War: Life or Death, as Luck Will Have It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe